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Peter Hook & The Light will be at The Sinclair in Cambridge, MA, on Saturday, November 26. Here is the interview that I did with him following the publication of his book Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division. (Originally published on DigBoston.com, February 4, 2013)

“The Joy Division book is about boys chasing a dream, you know, coming from punk, not sullied by money or excess, drugs, sex, and rock ‘n roll.”

As a member of the English bands Joy Division in the 1970s and New Order in the 1980s, bassist Peter Hook helped to – in his words – “change the world of music not once but twice.” Now 56 years old, he tours with his new band The Light, delighting audiences with performances of his previous bands’ songs. Having first become a published author in 2010, he is currently appearing in bookstores across the US to promote his second book, Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division, which was published by It Books (a division of HarperCollins) on January 29.

“Hooky” recently spoke to me by phone from his room at the Prescott Hotel in San Francisco.

Do you still really not care if you, as you write on page 203, “piss off any journalist”?
(laughs) I’ve had journalists be wonderful and I’ve had journalists be awful. It doesn’t stop you really. You do have to learn to cope with that. You’ve got to trust what you’re doing, and believe in what you’re doing yourself.

As long as enough people like it so that you can carry on performing, that’s all that matters.

I was surprised to read that you and Bernard Sumner (Joy Division and New Order’s guitarist) had Santana stickers on your scooters when you were teenagers.
I’m still a great fan of Santana. I think you realize that there’s a place for everything in your head, isn’t there? Santana and that album in particular [1970′s Abraxas] reminds me of being 16-17 and just discovering life. I still have a great love for it, a great fondness.

I did love Deep Purple, you know. That idea of getting rid of all the old musicians and sweeping them away like sort of to create a new world was such a young and naïve way of thinking. It was actually quite weird because as a 56-year-old old fart, I wanted to get rid of myself, which is quite scary. I’m so glad I didn’t, because I enjoy being a musician just as much now as I did when I was 21, so I’m very glad I didn’t get my own way, to say the least.

Did you interact with Morrissey or Mark E. Smith (later of The Fall) at the Sex Pistols show in Manchester on June 4, 1976?
No. They were all strangers to us. There were very few people there, only about forty. The venue must have held three or four hundred. Once the The Sex Pistols came on…you were literally in awe. It wasn’t the magnificence of it. It wasn’t like seeing Led Zeppelin do “Stairway To Heaven” or anything like that. It touched a raw nerve in your body.

I walked into that Sex Pistols gig a normal kid, 9-to-5 job, and walked out a musician. It changed a lot of people’s lives who were in that room at the time.

Ian Curtis, Bernard Sumner, Stephen Morris, Peter Hook

After that gig, you said that the the band that you were starting would have two rules: “Act like The Sex Pistols [and] look like The Sex Pistols.” However, Joy Division never sounded like The Sex Pistols.
Never. Within six months we were writing songs that you’re going to be proud of all of your life. Bernard and I, while we didn’t sound like The Sex Pistols, we still felt like The Sex Pistols. But the songs we were writing were nothing like them. They were much more adult. They were much more mature, much more long-lasting, much classier songs.

The art is picking an inspiration, using it, and then not sounding like it. We were very good at that. There were a lot of bands that weren’t that great at it.

Throughout the book, you make it clear that you were very proud of Joy Division’s music as well as the fact that you “managed to stay cool, credible, and independent.” Were there any bands that you considered to be worthy adversaries in terms of creativity and integrity?
Psychedelic Furs, Siouxsie & the Banshees, Gang of Four. They all made fantastic, fantastic first records. Siouxsie were to me the closest thing to Joy Division. On the second album, when they got the proper guitarist and the proper bass player, to me they went a bit more normal, shall we say.

What about The Fall?
I’ve always had a very, very strange relationship with [Fall lead singer and songwriter] Mark E. Smith. I am so competitive. Because he was in Manchester, he was sort of too close and too much in competition to ever be friends. Whilst I like some of The Fall’s music, I think he’s a really clever geezer, [we] don’t have great relationship.

It took me years, actually, to admit to liking The Smiths. Until [their 1986 album] The Queen is Dead, I fucking hated them, for no other reason than that they were in competition with New Order. Morrissey was always very outspoken in his distaste for Joy Division. He thought they were miserable and gloomy, and shit basically. You sort of learn to live together. When I got to The Queen Is Dead, I heard that LP, I thought, ‘Ah shit, I can’t pretend I don’t like ‘em anymore!’ I had to give in. It’s a great record.

You name your favorite Joy Division song in the book. I won’t give it away, but I will quote you as writing, “I mean, it might change tomorrow.” Have you changed your mind since the book came out?
I did! (laughs)

Do you plan to write a book about New Order specifically, or do you consider The Hacienda, your previous work, to be that book?
I’m going to write a New Order book specifically. The Joy Division book is about boys chasing a dream, you know, coming from punk, not sullied by money or excess, drugs, sex, and rock ‘n roll. Once we got to New Order…it was a lot about sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll, so it’s a completely different story.

This originally ran on DigBoston.com in early May 2014. Since Ghosts of Jupiter are currently doing a Thursday night residency at the Lizard Lounge in Cambridge, I figured that I would repost the interview that I did with lead singer Nate Wilson here on my blog.

NATE WILSON: I’d say it was probably closer to 1972 but yeah, I think he was on the right track. At the same time I think it’s kind of closed-minded to be one of those people who always says “I don’t listen to anything that was recorded after 1972…..blah blah blah.” I like a lot of contemporary bands and I’m always searching around for new shit to get into. It just so happens that all the new stuff I’m into SOUNDS like it was recorded in the 70’s. So to clarify, I don’t listen to anything that SOUNDS like it was recorded after 1972.

ME: Whichever year it was, which albums, artists, and songs contributed to the molding of said perfection?

NATE WILSON: There are a ton. Big ones for me are Jethro Tull‘s Thick as a Brick, [Yes’s] The Yes Album, Captain Beyond [self-titled debut], Meddle [Pink Floyd], [Traffic’s] The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys….

ME: When did it reach its nadir, or are we still awaiting it?

NATE WILSON: I have to admit that I had to Google nadir. I thought it was a Spanish verb.

But it’s really tough to pick out some low-point in music. Again, it’s easy to complain that there’s no good music and everything was better way back when. But there’s always been some good music out there, and there’s always been a ton of garbage, too. I remember that time period just before the Internet changed everything as being particularly shitty. It just seemed like major labels and MTV had so much power and control over the pipeline and it was basically musical fast food. Now, at least as a music fan, there’s a whole new universe available to discover things you never would have heard of in the past.

ME: Fill in the blank: “I wish that I were half the singer-songwriter/musician that _______________ is?”

NATE WILSON: Off the top of my head probably Dig! about the Brian Jonestown Massacre. I like their music but I love the train wreck even more! Honorable mentions are Last Days Here and that newish one about Ginger Baker [Beware of Mr. Baker]. OK—those are all train wreck movies I guess!

ME: Did transitioning from the Nate Wilson Group to Ghosts of Jupiter consist of anything other than a change in name (e.g., line-up changes, relocation)?

NATE WILSON: We had a few different bassists when we were Nate Wilson Group, and when we solidified the line-up and added our second guitarist I think we figured it was time to have a proper name. I did move to Worcester, but that’s incidental.

ME: How do you draw on your training at the New England Conservatory when composing music? Which field is your University of New Hampshire degree in?

NATE WILSON: My degree from UNH is in music performance. I always draw on my musical training, although the stuff I studied in school is fairly different from what the band sounds like. But studying music in an academic setting I think just broadens your awareness of sound in general. You don’t always use everything you learned in classical music or jazz within the setting of a rock band, but that awareness helps your creative process.

ME: How did the Museum of Science show come about and how long did that run?

NATE WILSON: It ran for over a year which was pretty amazing. The idea came from our friend Phil Stepanian, who has helped us with a bunch of management stuff over the years. He just beat some doors down for us over there and they thought it was an interesting enough idea to give us a shot at it.

ME: If Ghosts of Jupiter were to do an album of covers, what would you offer (2 or 3 songs/artists) and what would you expect each of your bandmates to propose?

NATE WILSON: Man, that’s a tough one. I’d love to cover a bunch of Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd, but I don’t know if recording it would make much sense. My take on it would be to re-create it EXACTLY the way it sounded on those records ‘cause its fucking awesome. So what would be the point of that really I guess…..

ME: How widely has the band toured and what is the largest audience for which you have performed?

NATE WILSON: We’ve stayed pretty close to the Northeast for the most part. We did a tour out to the Midwest with our friends the Buffalo Killers a few years back, and we did a few tours in the US Virgin Islands, but those were really just glorified vacations. The biggest crowd we’ve played for was probably at the Hatch Shell in Boston where we opened for Blue Oyster Cult.

ME: What is the plan for the next Ghosts of Jupiter recording?

NATE WILSON: We’re already recording it. We’ve cobbled together our own little recording rig and lately have been of the mind to forgo recording in studios. It’s freed us up financially to experiment a whole lot more. We recently rented a house in Vermont and did some tracking there. We recorded most of the keyboards at my home. I don’t know if we’ll do the entire project on our own, but so far it’s been a lot more fruitful to be off the clock.

Ghosts of Jupiter are at the Lizard Lounge (1667 Mass Ave, Cambridge) on February 12, 19, and 26. Two sets: 8:30 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. Tickets for the February 12 show may be purchased here for $12.

Here, at not-so-long-last, is my extremely amateur blog version of my Facebook note about albums from 2013 that — with one or two exceptions — have not appeared on critics’ favorites lists but that I happen to think are pretty good.

Notes on the list and its order:

1. Titles that are hyperlinked go to reviews. Artist names that are hyperlinked go to interviews. (If both are hyperlinked, well, you figure it out.)

2. The first seven are ones about which I wrote something, and are in the chronological order in which I wrote about them. Entries 8 through 11 include links to pieces by my colleagues at DigBoston.

3. If the links do not include a video, or if an entry does not include a hyperlink at all (i.e., if neither I nor DigBoston wrote about it), then I have in embedded a video on the page itself.

4. The 11 about which I or DigBoston wrote something appear first. Otherwise, this list is in no particular order.

It has been many, many a year (like, at least 7) since a friend of mine told me that of all the people in the world whom she knew, I should have a blog. Now, I think that I do. I reckon that I will check in every now and then with thoughts on music, books, politics, comedy, television, movies, podcasts, food, and quality highlighters.

I will happy accept advice from any and all of the more accomplished bloggers out there. In fact, I can give you my password and let you fix it up yourself if you want to.